The Visitors

by Catherine Burns

  MORNING

  Marion woke the following morning with a heavy feeling that at first she couldn’t explain. Then she remembered that John had been cross with her the previous evening about Judith and the sycamore tree and how he had gone to bed without saying good night. She lay in bed for nearly an hour mulling over her brother’s mood; it was unbearable when he got like this, but there was no point in trying to talk to him about it—that always made things worse.

  Eventually she forced herself to get out of bed and put on her fleecy blue dressing gown and slippers. While brushing her teeth she noticed one of her molars was nagging a little, and when she spat, there was a tinge of blood in the sink. The possibility of a trip to the dentist filled her with dread.

  “Why do things always have to be so ugly and mean?” she wondered, “why can’t they just be smooth and sweet for a while?”

  It was nearly a quarter past eleven when she managed to get down to the kitchen for her morning cup of tea. While she was waiting for the kettle to boil she looked out of the window. Around the gray skeleton of the sycamore tree was a promising hint of green.

  Holding her cup of tea in her hand, she went out into the garden and walked towards the end of the lawn to look more closely at the tree.

  “Those are buds and it’s only February too,” she said to herself. “It can’t be dead after all. Judith was wrong.” She smiled, and all of a sudden the ache in her jaw melted away.

  A few feet away from the base of the tree she noticed a dark space on the turf. That was the place where Dad had burnt that box all those years ago. How strange, she thought to herself, that the grass had never grown back.

  MARION’S WALK

  As March progressed and the dense, dark winter became slowly diluted by the promise of spring, Marion found it a little easier to rise in the mornings. Each day she would go to the window and look at the sycamore and, seeing it unbroken, feel relief, as if it were an ailing relative that had survived the night. Then one morning in April she looked out to see sun shining through the branches and a scattering of daffodils around the roots and was filled with a giddy hopefulness, though she couldn’t say exactly what it was she hoped for.

  For breakfast, Marion had charred toast and some leftover spaghetti hoops that she found in the fridge. After she was done eating she filled a hot water bottle from the kettle and then went into the living room and lay down on the sofa. She placed the hot water bottle beneath her sweater so it rested on her tummy. The wobbly heat felt good, like a living creature pressed up against her. She wondered how it would feel to have a baby in her stomach and how strange it was to think that another person could grow inside your body. Marion remained on the sofa for nearly an hour, her mind idling from daydream to daydream.

  Her brother once said if the human race in general shared Marion’s disposition, it was unlikely they would have evolved much beyond the level of jellyfish. Marion had never had any kind of job. Of course neither she nor John needed to earn a living, they had “family money,” something that had always surrounded and nourished them, like amniotic fluid. If Marion had been required to support herself, it was difficult to imagine what sort of employment might suit her. She got flustered by the slightest pressure, her memory was poor, and anything to do with money or numbers made her so anxious, she would feel physically sick. Her handwriting was unreadable and her spelling atrocious.

  Working in a shop or office was as ambitious for her as becoming an astronaut. She found dealing with people unsettling and she got upset too easily or worried she had offended them for no reason at all. Answering phone calls made her jittery with fear. Dad had always said that she was just too sensitive for the big wide world, and more suited to staying at home, so that was what she had done.

  Marion heard the front door open then slam shut. John would be off to the Royal Oak public house. He usually visited once a week to play chess in the lounge bar with the other regulars. She just hoped he didn’t have too many pints of beer, as drink put him in a foul mood.

  After a while she switched on the TV, as it was time for the start of the afternoon Heartfelt Production. The film was about an American family, mother and father in their early thirties, boy of ten, and a baby girl, who lived in a large house in some pretty suburban town. Everything in their world looked soft, sunlit, and hazy, and cheerful music played while the family went about their lives.

  Then Marion remembered that she had bought some Cadbury Creme Eggs the day before and put them in the fridge. She would have one with a cup of tea when the advert break came on. As soon as she had promised herself the chocolate treat there was no room for anything else in her head, and she found it impossible to concentrate on her film for thinking about the sticky texture of chocolate in her mouth and the sweetness washing around her tongue. It was as if she were a fish caught on an invisible hook that was pulling her towards the kitchen.

  The first egg she swallowed in only three bites, standing with the fridge door open, but her treat was over so quickly that she felt cheated and allowed herself to take the second back to the sofa to eat it in front of the TV, but by that time the commercial break had begun, and she felt annoyed because she wanted to enjoy the chocolate during the film, not while watching some silly advert about car insurance. Try as she might, she was unable to wait three minutes for the adverts to end and stuffed the second creme egg into her mouth while a woman on the TV mopped her kitchen with SupaClean. When the film came back on, the little boy was now in a coma in hospital, and the father was being interviewed in the police station; Marion realized she must have missed some crucial plot development while she was in the kitchen and it would be impossible for her now to get back into the program, so she switched off the television.

  As she sat back on the sofa, a dust-laden beam of sunlight squeezed through the gap between tapestry-thick curtains and poked her like an accusing finger.

  “Perhaps I ought to go out and get a little bit of exercise. It might do me good,” she thought with that sense of guilt people get from being inside on a pleasant day.

  “Don’t get up,” said a voice in her head. “Another film begins in just over an hour.”

  “No,” she told the voice. “Judith is right, I don’t get out often enough, at least to leave the house and go for a walk would be something. I can’t just lie here all day long—I’ll turn into a vegetable.”

  • • •

  IF YOU WALKED right to the end of Grange Road, you came to Northport High Street, then to the promenade and eventually a wrought-iron pier jutting out into the Irish Sea. In the Victorian era, men who had made their fortunes in the cotton trade took their families to Northport to stay in its grand hotels and bathe in the sea. While other northern seaside towns had become run-down in the last thirty years, their hotels filling with asylum seekers and drug addicts, Northport retained its elegant, pastel-colored charm. One or two celebrity chefs opened restaurants along the front, and the beach won awards for cleanliness and beauty.

  As she made her way down the high street, breathing in the sharp, salt-tinged air, Marion felt pleased she had made the decision to get out of the house. Passing Stowe’s Tea Rooms, she glanced through the window at customers eating cakes and drinking tea. Years ago she used to go in there with Mother and they would share a plate of chocolate éclairs.

  The shop next door, formerly the Beauty Emporium, its window filled with jars of cold cream and opulent bath oils, was now a Bargain Land, where you could buy three antiperspirant sprays for a pound. Next she passed Barbette’s Boutique, where Mother used to buy her clothes. They were having a closing-down sale, and a lone salmon-pink suit with a bright red “Reduced for Sale” sash stood in the window. Marion herself rarely bought clothes; if she desperately needed something, she got it from one of the many secondhand shops in Northport. This was not because she was short of money (though the fabric wholesale business had been sold for a pittance after Dad drowned in the accident, she and John had inherited money from Mother
’s side), but because dress shops and the women who worked in them intimidated her.

  Object, Judith’s gallery, stood out from the other shops on the high street. Through the window, Marion saw Judith talking to Greg. He wore a checked shirt, and his full beard made him look like some Victorian gentleman. He was nodding solemnly while Judith pointed at things in the shop.

  Then Marion saw the cats made by the drug-dealing prostitute, and thought them just about the ugliest things she had ever set eyes on. The artist had taken two glass cat’s eyes, either green or blue, and several wires meant to represent whiskers then stuck them in the middle of hideous lumps of brown clay. The cats were all labeled with names like “Tufty,” “Nibbles,” and “Gingersnap,” and the smallest of them cost £155. Who would be stupid enough to buy something so horrible for that price? wondered Marion, walking away quickly before Judith could see her and pull her into the shop.

  • • •

  THE SCREAMS OF people riding the Shooting Star got louder as she approached the seafront. Marion heard her mother’s voice in her head: Five people burnt to death at the top of the roller coaster when I was a girl. My sister Agnes and I watched them eaten by flames while they were still hanging upside down. This was just one of the stories that Mother had repeated so many times, it had become stuck in Marion’s brain. Just walking past a particular place would trigger the play button, and she would hear the tale recounted as clearly as if Mother were right next to her.

  The promenade was choked with families visiting Northport for the day. Even a hint of warm weather would cause these people to hatch from nowhere like bluebottles, then swarm all over the town. Parents led groups of sour-faced children holding inflatable toys like battering rams, and Marion often had to step into the gutter to avoid being barged out of their way. They called out to each other like wild beasts: “Darren! Callum! Kelly! Hurry up or we’ll never get t’ beach!” Where do they get these people from? Mother’s voice demanded, as if they had been ordered in bulk from a wholesaler. You used to see a much better class of person coming to Northport when I was a girl.

  When she reached the end of the high street, the sight of the dunes shining in the spring sunshine gave her a feeling of bright fear. There is sinking sand farther out that can suck you in before you even know what’s happening; no one would come to help you for fear of getting trapped themselves. Many years ago a woman and two young children lost their lives because they ignored the warning signs. Sometimes Marion wondered why Mother chose to live in Northport at all, when everything about the seaside was so fraught with peril.

  Mother had even more horror stories to tell about the amusement arcade on the pier. Those places are just child traps run by perverts who want to lure you in. There was the little boy who went to play on the slot machines while his mother listened to a brass band at the pavilion. They never saw him again, but someone found his left shoe washed up by the tide. It was up to your imagination to fill in the gory blanks as to how the shoe had become separated from the boy. Despite these warnings, John and Marion would sometimes sneak off to stare in wonder at the penny cascades and fruit machines, unable to resist the twinkling music and pretty lights that indeed seemed designed to entice a child to some dreadful fate.

  Then she saw the Museum of Wax and shivered. Really, she couldn’t understand why that seedy old place had stayed open all these years. Who on earth went in there? The last time she had visited the museum had been with her brother just before he had gone off to Oxford. A sudden gray cloud swallowed the sun and the air chilled. On the horizon were more clouds. Marion suddenly wished someone kind and capable would grasp her hand and lead her home. She turned around and began to make her way back.

  Before she had got even halfway home, the rain came sloshing down, soaking into her slacks and sweater. What is wrong with you, Marion, demanded Mother’s voice, would it have been any trouble to slip your raincoat into your shopping bag? She stepped into the doorway of Tyler and Co. Estate Agents to shelter from the downpour. Surely no one would mind if she waited there for a couple of minutes, would they? Perhaps by then the rain would blow over. As she was standing there, she noticed a listing in the window:

  Flat 5

  OCEAN VISTA COURT

  Two bedroom luxury flat with seafront balcony. £250,000

  As she studied the photographs of the flat interior, a confetti-burst of happy memories filled her head; it was the flat where her beloved aunt Agnes used to live.

  There was the large bright living room with the balcony overlooking the sea, the spare bedroom where she had slept when, as a child, she was allowed to stay over. And there was the kitchen where her aunt had shown her how to make French toast and fruit trifle with tins of mandarins and orange jelly. Of course the flat had changed; black and white tiles and a fancy modern shower replaced the old avocado bathroom suite, and the carpets were all beige rather than peach shag, but it was still recognizable from all those years ago.

  As she was staring at the listing, a handsome young man in a suit, his fair hair falling into a long fringe, came out of the shop.

  “Hi there, I’m Simon,” he said, “can I help you?”

  Marion hesitated—what should she say? It seemed strange that he should come out of the shop to speak to her like that. Perhaps he was angry with her for using the doorway to shelter, but his smile seemed friendly.

  “I was just looking at that flat, the one with the balcony overlooking the beach.”

  “Oh yes, a very well-appointed seafront property—they don’t come up very often, you know. Would you like to see it? I’ve got some free time right now if you’re interested.”

  Marion didn’t really know why she agreed to go and see the flat; perhaps it was because she was too timid to refuse. Only minutes after she had gone to shelter from the rain she found herself sitting in Simon’s spotlessly clean car on a seat that was comfier than an easy chair. For a moment, remembering her mother’s warning against getting in cars with strange men, she felt a twinge of fear, then immediately reproached herself, Don’t be so silly, what would a handsome young chap like him possibly want with you? And anyway he works for the estate agency, so he isn’t really a stranger.

  • • •

  DURING THE SHORT drive Marion’s stomach turned to ice; it was the first time she had visited Ocean Vista Court since she was a child. She must be careful not to get emotional and make a fool of herself in front of the estate agent. Then the moment Simon opened the front door and she walked inside the hallway her nervousness melted away. The carpets felt soft beneath her feet, and the summery colors of the wallpaper and furnishings seemed to glow with some wonderful energy that warmed her bones and cleared away the dense, gray feeling in her head.

  “Can I go out onto the balcony?” she asked.

  “Of course.” Simon found the key for the French windows and opened them. As she stepped out she saw the rain clouds had blown away and the wide flat sea glimmered like tinfoil in the afternoon sun. She breathed in deeply, feeling exhilarated by the view. A woman was playing with her dog on the beach. Marion remembered how her aunt often let Bunty, her poodle, off the lead so she could race across the sands when they went walking. Aunt Agnes was so different from her sister; she didn’t see danger and ugliness everywhere. Life was one delightful adventure to her; she played Maria in the Northport Players production of The Sound of Music and went on wine-tasting holidays to Provence with her French Conversation group.

  To the left you could see the pier, teeming with tourists. This was where Marion and her aunt spent hours looking in the little shops and kiosks that sold souvenirs. Aunt Agnes loved to buy her niece presents. Marion would pretend these little trinkets had magical properties; a bar of scented soap could make an ugly person beautiful; the little pixie in the snow globe would come alive at night and protect you from evil spirits; a teddy bear was really a prince who had been enchanted by a witch.

  “So what do you think, then?”

  Marion r
ealized she had been so distracted by memories of her aunt she had almost forgotten Simon was there.

  “It’s lovely.”

  He paused. She realized she was expected to say whether or not she was interested in buying it. Even the idea of Marion buying a flat herself was too silly to imagine, and she felt suddenly guilty at having wasted his time.

  “I—do like the flat,” she stuttered, “but of course—I—will have to think about it. I mean, it’s a big step, isn’t it?”

  The young man’s large eyes filled with sadness, and his lower lip dropped very slightly. Marion was shocked by how genuinely upset he seemed and how much disappointing him, in turn, pained her.

  “I might decide to take it in the future, but for the present . . .” Not knowing what else to say, she trailed off.

  “Perhaps if you give me your details, then I could let you know if there is any change in price, or if any similar properties come on the market?” he asked hopefully.

  “Yes—yes—of course.” To Marion’s relief, Simon seemed satisfied with this, and she gave him her address and number to tap into his nice modern phone.

  Despite living in a popular coastal resort, the Zetland family rarely visited the beach, and when they did, the main purpose of the trip, as far as Marion could tell, was for Mother to remind herself how much she despised it. On these rare outings, Mrs. Morrison, the family housekeeper, was invited as both guest and servant to the event. She would arrive to work early and spend an age slicing and buttering to prepare for the picnic. Mother liked egg-and-cress sandwiches that John complained smelled like farts when you first opened the Tupperware containers. Meat paste for Dad, even though Mother thought it common. Around ten thirty in the morning the Bentley would be loaded up for the ten-minute drive to the seafront.